Junius have always beguiled listeners with their straddling of the border between light and dark. Such light-play features prominently in their lyrics and artwork as well, so imagining it to be some sort of coincidence is an ill advised move. Indeed, very little of the band’s decisions seem to be accident; all of their records, LPs and EPs included, give off an air of contained power, meticulously planned theories which, nonetheless, explode with instinctive and primal energy when performed.

Rash bursts of powerviolence are the best bursts of powerviolence. Why pack ten songs into twenty five minutes? Five in ten is just right. This fresh-as-all-fuzz release from Pissed On only stops to piss on a burning pedestrian at the culmination of a brief, brutal attack. Raw and ready, five tracks merge into one erratic performance, over so quick that words can’t catch up. Hence this rough, chopped up review of The Hanged Man.

Production is a mystery. At a glance, it seems like a simple task: record some tracks, mix ‘em together, work out a couple kinks on GarageBand, and voilà! Album. The reality, of course, is quite a bit more complicated than that. To be successful, production must serve the music; there…

Metal is a deeply saturated genre of music. The overwhelming glut of new albums that cross one’s path on a regular basis make it nearly impossible to absorb all of the new music being released. You can listen to hundreds of metal albums in a year and still kick yourself in the teeth for missing nearly every album on most metal publications’ year-end lists. Given this current state of affairs, it is not at all difficult to miss out on some really great music. Which is a shame, as well as the only logical explanation I have for why Swiss progressive metalcore aficionados Scars Divide aren’t absolutely annihilating the metal world right now.